Arts, Media & Entertainment: Poetry Quotes

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"I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after"

Wallace Stevens, Poet

Wallace Stevens

"I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay"

Dylan Thomas, Poet

"Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name"

Dylan Thomas, Poet

"Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction"

Dylan Thomas, Poet

"Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great"

Dylan Thomas, Poet

"When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses"

Jean Cocteau, Director

Jean Cocteau

"Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance"

Anne Sexton, Poet

Anne Sexton

"The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot"

Anne Sexton, Poet

Anne Sexton

"Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"Oft when the white, still dawn lifted the skies and pushed the hills apart, I have felt it like a glory in my heart"

Edwin Markham, Poet

Edwin Markham

"The poet doesn't invent. He listens"

Jean Cocteau, Director

Jean Cocteau

"I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments, I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

Carl Sandburg

"The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood"

Jean Cocteau, Director

Jean Cocteau

"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed"

Jean Cocteau, Director

Jean Cocteau

"Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature"

Jean Cocteau, Director

Jean Cocteau

"Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits"

Christopher Marlowe, Dramatist

Christopher Marlowe

"I am not quite a poet, but I am something of the kind"

Edmund Wilson, Critic

Edmund Wilson

"Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose"

Walter Savage Landor, Poet

Walter Savage Landor

"What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project"

Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet

"Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words"

Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet

"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman"

Emile Zola, Novelist

Emile Zola

"And now may the blessing of God rest upon all men. I have told unto them the Epic of Kings, and the Epic of Kings is come to a close, and the tale of their deeds is ended"

Ferdowsi, Poet

"I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife"

Philip Larkin, Poet

"A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

George Henry Lewes

"Like ships that have gone down at sea, when heaven was all tranquillity"

Thomas Moore, Poet

Thomas Moore

"Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet"

Oliver Goldsmith, Poet

"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep"

Salman Rushdie, Novelist

"As to London, we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper"

Goldwin Smith, Historian

"For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim"

Philip Pullman, Writer

"A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin"

Edmond De Goncourt, Writer

"I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem"

Beck, Musician

"What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down"

John Ciardi, Dramatist

John Ciardi

"Poetry lies its way to the truth"

John Ciardi, Dramatist

John Ciardi

"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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